Fourth LulzSec Member Pleads Guilty to Hacking Sony, Nintendo

Ryan Ackroyd, 26, entered the plea at a hearing in London
today after having previously denied his involvement in the
cyber-attacks. He will be sentenced on May 14 along with the
three other hackers, Judge Deborah Taylor said.

“They turned to him for his expertise as a hacker,”
prosecutor Sandip Patel said at the hearing.

Ackroyd, from Mexborough, England, carried out attacks on
the websites of the Arizona State Police, Sony, News Corp.’s
Twentieth Century Fox, the U.K.’s National Health Service and
technology-security company HBGary Inc. between February 2011
and September 2011, prosecutors said in the indictment.

Jake Davis, 20, and Mustafa Al-Bassam, 18, also members of
LulzSec who were defendants in the case, had previously pleaded
to disrupting websites at the Central Intelligence Agency and
the U.K.’s Serious Organised Crime Agency.

The hackers modified some computers, including adjusting
security settings and access to confidential data, and
redirected visitors to the hackers’ websites, prosecutors said.

Ryan Cleary, the fourth member of the group, pleaded guilty
to six charges in June.

Cleary, from Wickford, England, also admitted to installing
or altering files on Pentagon computers operated by the U.S. Air
Force and constructing a network of computers, known as a
botnet, which could perform distributed denial of service
attacks and direct it to target websites operated by a U.K. web
hosting site.

Denial-of-service attacks flood computer networks with
requests for information until they shut down.